Followup to my post on the Iraq election. Back when Allawi visited the US he was dismissed as a "puppet" and a "thug". Had he won the Iraq government would have been dismissed as Bush's puppet regime. Now that Iraq's largest ethnic group won the most seats in the election, it is being spun by the Washington Post as a disaster for the US.

Yet the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq

He's an article that shows just how misguided the Washington Post article is:

Only three of her 21 paragraphs reference material dissenting from her thesis; however, they’re powerfully undercutting to her premise nonetheless:

1. A leading prime minister contender, Adel Abdul Mahdi, argues for no Shiite or Islamic government;
2. U.S. and regional analysts agree that Iraq will not be a likely surrogate to Iran;
3. and Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rejects Iran’s theocracy as a model.

Here's a different column making some of the same points.

One could note, for instance, what Iraqi Shiite leaders have actually been saying since their election victory, which is that they have no interest in or intention of copying the Iranian model or in making Iraq an ally of Iran. Adel Abdul Mahdi, a top Shiite leader, told CNN exactly that. He also insisted, "We don't want either a Shiite government or an Islamic government." Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Shiite alliance that won 48 percent of the vote, has pledged a "government of national unity," and already it is clear that bargaining among Iraq's constituencies is likely to produce a government with strong Kurdish as well as Sunni participation

And here's a column from someone in the middle of the Bush/FDR debate.

On the "Jeff Gannon" story, columnists and bloggers frequently specualte that "Gannon" was given press credintials so that he could pitch softball questions to the President. Obviously Clinton did not need to plant reporters. Not when he could get a network anchor to gush:

If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we'd take it right now and walk away winners